he’s flying to Charlotte, Heathrow, Nairobi. Going on a month-long medical mission to Kenya. 20 years old…I envy him…

I hope your son stays safe, sounds like a great adventure.

If only to be 20 again.

kwg

Good for your Son! I hope he has a very fulfilling trip and I’ll pray for his safety.

Youth is wasted on the young!

Well Congrats. Hope he learns a lot while there...

on my end, I wouldn't even let my 29 year old son go down to Oakland if I had any input in the decision.

Oakland is too "close" to Africa for my tastes.

Future Birdwatcher?

Safe travels too ! He will come back a changed man!

Good for him, most of Kenya is pretty safe by African standards. I’m going to bet it will change his perspective on life a bit, it’s hard not to going to place like that.

Ditto on staying safe! Don't think I'd be too excited about me or my family going overseas nowadays! Just too much opportunity for trouble!

Doctors without borders? My wifes niece did that. We thought it was insane to get off a puddle jumper, get into a beater Toyota and drive off into the jungles of Ecuador with a stranger.
God bless your son and other givers like him.

Just curious. What does a 20 year old do on a "medical mission" in Africa?

Best of luck to him.

L.W.

Hope they don't eat him.

He’ll have a great time and be carefully sequestered around while he’s there. I dunno if he’ll be in a malaria zone or need shots against rabies.

Hey, I spent three years in an African village 🙂 School holidays I worked on the vaccination team out of Agogo Presbyterian Mission Hospital, which looks to be a much bigger deal on the ‘net now than it was forty years ago.

My job was to maintain the vaccine guns and drive the medical teams around in their LandRovers. Four wheeling in Africa, pretty durn cool 😎

European medical students would stay over on short internships and I would take them on a twenty-five mile hike across the forest and plain to the Afram river (crossed by canoe) where there was an actual mud-walled thatched roof African village (not easy to find, even then, they prob’ly all have satellite TV now 🙂).

Damn, 25 miles there. 25 miles back the next day, didn’t think anything of it, can’t hardly walk around the block now.

Tell him to take a picture of Obama’s home town.😂

Congrats on a well raised son

Takes a certain type character to do that type of thing

cra1948: I also wish for your son to have a safe and rewarding experience.
I will say this though I would have NO part in sending any of my four VarmintChildren off to Africa in this day and age.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Damn...thought that was the MCRD flight. I reckon they're all hard on Dad.

He’s a pre-med student, going into his senior year. His advisor sets this up for a group of students every year. They help out in a small clinic that handles a couple of hundred patients a day. Two students go at a time. Have to make their own way to Nairobi where they’re picked up at the airport. Very valuable experience in a number of ways. When he gets back he’s got an internship the rest of the summer with a plastic surgeon in private practice who has told him he’ll let him do “everything the law allows” in the OR.

Thank you. We didn’t bring up our kids to live in fear.

Sounds like the young man has his act together and a bright future ahead.

He’s had a bunch of shots and has been taking some sort of anti-malarial stuff.

Safe travels!!!

College buddy spent some time in Ethopia when he was 21 or 22. Peace Corps smallpox vaccination field crew.

Invaluable experience for Med school application.

I hope your son has a great trip & that it's a big adventure. Experiences like this can make a really big impression on young people. I'm not going to lie, but I took a few deep breaths and was more than a bit nervous when my "little girl" was working on an agricultural project during her Master's degree in Mozambique. Mainly because the communication was really spotty & on more than one occasion, I got a terse message that didn't make me feel particularly thrilled followed by what seemed to be an interminable period of radio silence before I heard from her again. She ran into challenges. But you have to let your kids live their lives & find their path. So every time she heads off the grid, I just give her my full support.

CRA 1948, thank you for that information. Hope your son stays well and learns a lot.

L.W.

Good for your son. Hope all goes well for him.

Should be good experience. I turned 20 and 21 in Africa. I still mis my time there every day. Living in Africa gives you perspective.

Bb

Ditto to this!

Life ain't safe. Ever.
And it ends the same for everyone.
Once you accept that, risk is less risky.

Hope he has a good safe trip.
Maybe he will meet the love of his life?

Hate to say it, but if he comes back.

Have spend time in 3rd world country’s. Not a good place to be.

I knew a young gal who was graduating from Emory Medical School. She had signed up to do a one year tour in Africa, I don't recall which country.
I tried to talk her out of it, citing her risk of malaria, AIDS, and her getting kidnapped/raped etc. But she was determined to go.

She only lasted 8 months. She said the country was corrupt. She told me that at one point, her clinic got a $250K grant from the Red Cross. The next week the Vice President of the country was driving around in a new Mercedes. The next week, the President had a new Bentley. The clinic only saw a few thousand bucks of the Red Cross grant.

She said that country was hopelessly corrupt, and she gave up on them, and came back to start a medical practice in America.
However, she did not get malaria, that's the good news.

I pray he stays safe, let us know how he is doing. My boy left out for the Navy at 19. It was tough on me

Makes me wonder what the hell kids are thinking. I've preached to my kids how great the US of A is and they need to thankful for what they have here.

Man, what a testimony he will bring back!

Well done dad, well done.
I enjoy meeting young folks like him.

A dear friend has a daughter in the Antarctica right creating a film documenting the hunting traditions of the indigenous people there.

The Africa and Africans I knew was nothing like American ghetto culture at all. Most Africans I knew had nothing but contempt for American Urban Black culture.

Wherever I went in Ghana I had an offer of a free meal and a roof over my head, no strings attached. People living in abject poverty even by Ghanaian standards would offer to share what they had.

For three years I wandered without fear, from big cities to roadless bush, including all through the coup.

Of course Africa is a big place, like 3x the size of the Lower 48, so there’s Africa and then again there’s Africa. I was in Ghana, two countries over OTOH was Nigeria……

In which century did that take place?

When you was in diapers (as an infant I mean).

No photos of your lawn posted yet.

Oh.

So it’s not applicable in any way, right?

Here’s the stats as reported by Peace Corps Ghana for 2019.

https://files.peacecorps.gov/documents/Ghana_CHET_OSS.pdf

Doing the math prob’ly around 125 Volunteers in-country, no idea how many women but nowadays I’d WAG 70, a lot more now than forty years back.

92-95% saying they felt “very safe or safe” where they lived or worked. Doesn’t exactly jive with the crime stats on the exit survey wherein about half the women had been groped at some point and about one in
twenty saying they had been raped (date rape??).

We only had a handful of women and it was a close group, we all knew each other pretty well, met up regularly in Peace Corps Accra and in Lome, Togo. Never heard of that back then.

As for the other crime stats, pretty much the way it was 40 years back.

Hey I saw Hank Jr. play at Grant Park in 1996.

So Chicago is safe and awesome.

No worries. Everything is the same.

I wouldn’t wander around Chicago on a bet, then or now. It was my observation while overseas that few places were nearly as bad as an inner city in America.

Ghana is the size of Oregon, Looking at those stats I’d wander all over Ghana again in a heartbeat if the opportunity arose, Togo too. Benin? Blink and you’ll miss it. Nigeria, ya gotta be careful. To the west Cote d’Ivoire had a shooting war not too far back too.

Up north Ouagadougou was always the destination of choice (I never made it, sadly) but now radical Muslims are a thing up there.

I know you're proud (as you should be) - I hope he has safe travels and returns re-energized for his upcoming educational journey. I can not think of a more noble profession than being a physician or other medical care provider.

Update:
He arrived home last night, safe and sound and bursting with enthusiasm to tell us all about it. His academic advisor is an MD and spends every break from the school year running a free clinic in the slums of Nairobi. He said the clinic saw 300 - 400 patients a day. They worked ten hour days, days off in the middle of the week to be able to serve people on weekends who couldn't get off work during the week. He visited some people in their homes which consisted of 6 foot square corrugated roofing shacks. The had nothing. I had given him a heads up about the smell of third-world slums...he said that's how it was, smelled like an open sewer all the time.

They did get some opportunities to do some tourist stuff on their days off. They went white water rafting one day. He said after the safety lecture (mostly how to not get killed by hippos or eaten by crocodiles) five of the original group decided not to go. He saw a croc get bit in half by a hippo; saw buffalo, hippos, lions, elephants, rhino and cheetah, but was a little disappointed not to see a leopard. He said once you got out of the city, it was the most beautiful place he'd ever seen.

It was a great experience for him. Not the least valuable, was the fact that he had to travel to Nairobi on his own (Charleston to Charlotte to London to Nairobi.) That is a valuable experience in itself for a 20 year old. We've always believed in preparing the kids as best we can, then nudging them out of the nest.

After a few days at home, he's heading up to Myrtle Beach to spend the rest of the summer interning for a cosmetic surgeon who, after a military career, now specializes in "enhancements" for a bit more affluent clientele than what he had in Kenya. talk about both ends of the socio-economic spectrum....